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Talk:Army of Me/@comment-24712996-20140329230216/@comment-3575890-20140330005335
The thing with JLaw is that she has a very over active mind and she tends to say whatever first thought pops into her head, which is always a potential recipe for disaster. Her mouth kicks into overdrive before her brain finishes processing a thought. I myself can recall so many times a thought of mine came out all wrong because of the carelessness of my choice of words or nerves dampening my ability to vocalize my thoughts effectively. While some of her comments most certainly indicate a problematic line of thinking, I do not believe she genuinely advocates these warped misconceptions and views as much as she struggles with communicating the intended message effectively and appropriately and overall lacks the ability to throughly articulate her views and thoughts off the top of her head. I think she could certainly afford to be more educated and knowledgable on the matter of these hard-hitting subjects she addresses and also choose her words more carefully, but I don't think she's actually as ignorant as she can come off as either if that makes any sense. Now before I get into the part about JLaw policing how women's bodies should look, I would like to clarify that I am not one to trivialize shaming of any body types. In fact, as someone who identifies as one of those naturally skinny girls JLaw was talking about, I'm often exposed to attitudes like-minded to that of the nature of JLaw's comments, so I really don't take things like this lightly at all. I resent the unfairness of that thin-shaming is widely dismissed and not treated as the problematic phenomenon that it is because thinness is glorified and idealized in our culture and therefore people cling to this attitude that there's nothing to be offended of, despite that there is no flatter in being accused of looking malnourished and underfed (but that is another post for another time). Despite that JLaw's comment does come off as that she's shaming thin girls, I do not take that much offense to it because I interpret it to be a well intentioned comment. In a society that pushes an idealized body image that is both unattainable and unrealistic, there is very little positive representation of other body types perpetuated by the media out there for young girls, and I think Law recognizes that and was attempting, in her own way, to speak out against the twistedness of it rather than shame naturally skinny girls. In summation, the crux of her argument was that women's bodies do not need to be stick thin in order to be perceived as feminine and attractive. Don't get me started on that anti-feminist joke about Katniss she made and her tunnel-minded commentary about bisexuality because I could go on for paragraphs about how problematic that is, but I mostly chock that up to her trying to be comedic whilst appealing to common attitudes of the general masses and societal norms. As for her comment about Jesse's OCD, I agree that it came out as very ignorant and I will not stand here and try to justify it, but I do believe that yet again it was well intentioned. Rather than meaning to trivialize the seriousness of Jesse's disorder, she was awkwardly, in her own JLaw way, trying to make him feel good about himself; trying to apply some positivity to it. Point-blank, she shouldn't have said what she did at all, but her heart was in the right place. For the record, I don't condone or justify any of these things she's said. I just think a lot of what makes her come off as ignorant is a combination of factors: general nerves and pressure, she's not as educated on these topics as she could afford to be, she doesn't choose her words as carefully as she should, she wants people to see her as identifiable/relatable and therefore vies to appeal to as many demographics as she can at once, and uses humor (that quickly turns rancid) as a mechanism for easing social tension.